A key piece of equipment needed for liquid waste disposal at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina has successfully been replaced, the Department of Energy said Tuesday.
Melter 3 is in place and operational as of Dec. 29, when it began pouring treated waste into a storage canister, SRS said.
The Energy Department reported in February 2017 that it had to replace Savannah River’s Defense Waste Processing Facility’s Melter 2: a 65-ton refractory-lined melting vessel that receives high-level waste, then combines it with a mixture known as borosilicate frit to remove contamination. When heated in the melter, these elements form a molten glass, which is then poured into stainless-steel canisters for safe storage. The waste is temporarily stored at SRS, but will eventually be shipped away once the DOE identifies a permanent disposal facility.
The removal of Melter 2 and installation of Melter 3 required SRS to implement a site-wide liquid waste processing outage for nearly the entire calendar year.
The Defense Waste Processing Facility is designed to process over 30 million gallons of radioactive sludge and salt waste stored in more than 40 waste storage tanks, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons operations at SRS.
On Tuesday, SRS announced Melter 3 on Dec. 29 poured its first canisters of waste. Specifically, the melter completed filling a canister that Melter 2 had been filling when it malfunctioned, and then poured a full canister on Jan. 1. As of Tuesday, the new melter has filled six more canisters.
The swap was a $3 million project that took most of 2017. As the name indicates, Melter 2 was the second melter used at the DWPF. It functioned for close to 14 years and poured 2,819 canisters. Prior to that, Melter 1 lasted six years and produced 1,339 canisters, totaling 4,158 between the two melters. The site predicts that DWPF will pour 8,170 total canisters to complete the SRS liquid waste mission.
